“My high school boyfriend Hunter Casden?”
She laughs.
“Darn it, Minty, I thought I was the first one with the news for once,” she says.“He’s fine, but I couldn’tbelieveit when I saw his name on the charts as I was leaving.You know, I had to throw out that couch in the basement after you two broke up.”
I push my bangs off my forehead, thinkingI may as well tell her.
“Actually, mom, I?—”
I pause, frowning.
“Why’d you have to throw out the couch?”
“It was disgusting,” she says, matter-of-factly.“Minty, there was practically acruston it.”
I can feel myself turnbeet red, and I take a deep breath.
“Hunter and I are dating again and I need your help busting in to see him after visiting hours are over,” I say, the words rocketing out of my mouth.
There’s a pause.
“HunterCasden?”she says, sounding a little incredulous.
“What?Yes,” I say.It’s not like we were talking about adifferentHunter.
There’s a long pause on the other end.
“Please?”I say.
My mom sighs.
“All right,” she says.
ChapterThirty-Six
Hunter
On the upside,I get to watch this thunderstorm from indoors, behind the thick glass of my hospital room.The rain lashes against it, the sky almost black, the flashes of lightning intermittent shocks of white daylight.
It’s quite a show.
As it’s happening, I get an honest-to-God sponge bath.I try to convince the two kindly, middle-aged nurses that I could take a shower, but they fuss at me that I have second-degree burns over a sizable chunk of my body, and until I heal up a little, running water isn’t a good idea.
Honestly, I just want them to hurry up, because I’m secretly hoping I can see Clementine before visiting hours end.I know it’s not very likely, and I know that, atworst, she’ll come see me in the morning
They have to go through ten buckets of water before it stops turning black with soot, and then they can finally bandage me up.I’m not quite sure that my burns warranted allthat, but after my day, I don’t mind letting other people bathe me while I lie there.
At least I’m not Porter, who got rushed into surgery the second we were in the hospital.The guys in the helicopter, who rescued us, could barely look at his leg either.I heard one of them muttering to the otherhope he doesn’t lose that, but I was too busy sucking in oxygen from a mask to really listen.
I do hope he doesn’t lose it, though.
After they treat my burns with a sponge bath and gauze, I get to see the pulmonologist.She listens to my chest very seriously, asks me lots of questions, listens to my chest again, then frowns.
“I’m going to keep you overnight,” she says.“In the morning we can see if you’re going to need a pulmonary CT scan or not, because you likely breathed in some superheated air and it could have caused permanent scarring.”
I swallow and breathe in.All I know is my lungs kinda hurt.
“How much?”I ask her.
